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About NUI Galway

Since 1845, NUI Galway has been sharing the highest quality teaching and research with Ireland and the world. Find out what makes our University so special – from our distinguished history to the latest news and campus developments.

National University of Ireland Galway

NUI Galway ranks among the top 2% of Universities in the world. Our prestigious history spans almost two centuries. Our spectacular location boasts the unique landscape and culture of the west of Ireland. Our global network connects us to partners around the world. Our researchers are shaping the future. Our students are shaping their own.

SCHOLARSHIPS

‘Failed Stars’ Host Powerful Auroral Displays

International team led by Irish astronomer says that brown dwarfs behave more like planets than stars
Brown dwarfs are the mysterious middle children of celestial objects. These relatively cool, dim bodies are difficult to detect, and have remained hard to classify. They are too massive to be planets, yet possess some planet-like characteristics; they are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, a defining characteristic of stars, yet they have star-like attributes.
Now, by observing a brown dwarf 20 light-years away using both radio and optical telescopes, a team led by Dr Gregg Hallinan, NUI Galway astronomy PhD graduate and now assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, has found another feature that makes these so-called failed stars more like supersized planets - they host powerful auroras near their magnetic poles.
The findings were co-authored by scientists around the world, including many Irish-trained astronomers and Dr Ray Butler a lecturer in the School of Physics at NUI Galway, and appear in the July 30 issue of the journal Nature.
“We're finding that brown dwarfs are not like small stars in terms of their magnetic activity; they're like giant planets with hugely powerful auroras,” says Hallinan. “If you were able to stand on the surface of the brown dwarf we observed - something you could never do because of its extremely hot temperatures and crushing surface gravity - you would sometimes be treated to a fantastic light show courtesy of auroras hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than any detected in our solar system.”
In the early 2000s, astronomers began finding that brown dwarfs emit radio waves. At first, everyone assumed that the brown dwarfs were creating the radio waves in basically the same way that stars do - through the action of an extremely hot atmosphere, or corona, heated by magnetic activity near the object’s surface. But brown dwarfs do not generate large flares and charged-particle emissions in the way that our sun and other stars do, so the radio emissions were surprising.
While studying for his PhD at NUI Galway, in 2006, Hallinan discovered that brown dwarfs can actually pulse at radio frequencies. “We see a similar pulsing phenomenon from planets in our solar system,” says Hallinan, “and that radio emission is actually due to auroras”. Since then he has wondered if the radio emissions seen on brown dwarfs might be caused by auroras.
Auroral displays result when charged particles, carried by the stellar wind for example, manage to enter a planet’s magnetosphere, the region where such charged particles are influenced by the planet’s magnetic field. Once within the magnetosphere, those particles get accelerated along the planet's magnetic field lines to the planet’s poles, where they collide with gas atoms in the atmosphere and produce the bright emissions associated with auroras.
Following his hunch, Hallinan and his colleagues recently conducted an extensive observation campaign of a brown dwarf called LSRJ 1835+3259, using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the most powerful radio telescope in the world, as well as giant optical instruments that included Palomar’s Hale Telescope in California and the W. M. Keck Observatory's telescopes in Hawaii.
Using the VLA, they detected a bright pulse of radio waves that appeared as the brown dwarf rotated around. The object rotates every 2.84 hours, so the researchers were able to watch nearly three full rotations over the course of a single night.
Next, the astronomers used the Hale Telescope to observe that the brown dwarf varied optically on the same period as the radio pulses. Focusing on one of the spectral lines associated with excited hydrogen - the H-alpha emission line - they found that the object's brightness varied periodically.
Finally, Hallinan and his colleagues used the Keck telescopes to precisely measure the brightness of the brown dwarf over time—no simple feat given that these objects are intrinsically extremely faint, many thousands of times less luminous than our own sun. Hallinan and his team were able to establish that this hydrogen emission is a signature of auroras near the surface of the brown dwarf.
“As the electrons spiral down toward the atmosphere, they produce radio emissions, and then when they hit the atmosphere, they excite hydrogen in a process that occurs at Earth and other planets, albeit tens of thousands of times more intense”, explains Hallinan. “We now know that this kind of auroral behavior is extending all the way from planets up to brown dwarfs.”
In the case of brown dwarfs, charged particles cannot be driven into their magnetosphere by a stellar wind, as there is no stellar wind to do so. Hallinan says that some other source, such as an orbiting planet moving through the brown dwarf’s magnetosphere, may be generating a current and producing the auroras. “But until we map the aurora accurately, we won't be able to say where it's coming from”, he says.
He notes that brown dwarfs offer a convenient stepping stone to studying exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. “For the coolest brown dwarfs we've discovered, their atmosphere is pretty similar to what we would expect for many exoplanets, and you can actually look at a brown dwarf and study its atmosphere without having a star nearby that's a factor of a million times brighter obscuring your observations,” says Hallinan.
The work, ‘Magnetospherically driven optical and radio aurorae at the end of the main sequence’, was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation in the US.
In all, five of the authors are connected with NUI Galway. Ray Butler is a lecturer in the School of Physics; Aaron Golden is on extended leave from his lecturer position in the School of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics; Leon Harding did his PhD under the joint supervision of Drs Butler and Golden; and Stephen Bourke and the lead author Gregg Hallinan both did their PhDs under Dr Golden.
NUI Galway’s Ray Butler adds: “The key roles played by so many Irish-trained astronomers, in making the discoveries to produce this Nature publication, demonstrate that we have the skills and ideas to compete with the world’s best in this field. For example, I worked on planning the spectroscopy observations, and developing the methods to analyse them in order to extract the subtle signature of the brown dwarf’s rotation. The selection of this particular brown dwarf followed work by our co-author Leon Harding during his time as my PhD student, when he used GUFI (the Galway Ultra Fast Imager), an instrument that we built ourselves, to observe its optical variability with unprecedented accuracy.
Today’s major breakthrough and the successes of Irish astronomers abroad underline the compelling arguments for the government to reintroduce policies to fund this kind of basic research here in Ireland.”
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Final call for applications for the NUI Galway Taught Masters Scholarships Scheme

Applications are currently being accepted for NUI Galway’s Taught Masters Scholarship Scheme. The scholarships are valued at €1,500 per student and are awarded to all students undertaking a full-time Taught Masters Programme who have a first-class honours degree. The closing date for receipt of applications is Friday, 7 August at 5pm.
Valerie Leahy, Postgraduate Officer at NUI Galway, said: “At NUI Galway we are committed to supporting students who want to enhance their skills and employment prospects, and these scholarships are designed to reward and encourage the most committed and brightest students to progress to postgraduate study.”
NUI Galway offer over 150 taught postgraduate programmes across all disciplines. The University has a global reputation in the fields of Biomedical Science and Engineering; Human Rights, Applied Social Science and Public Policy; Energy, Environment and Marine Research; Data Analytics, Physical and Computational Sciences; and Digital Humanities, and offer specific postgraduate programmes in these areas.
Over 10% of NUI Galway postgraduate courses are taught fully online or via blended learning, so especially suit those who are working full or part-time and want to up-skill and enhance their career prospects.
The University also continues to lead the way in terms of graduate employment with 92% of postgraduates employed or in further study after graduating, versus the national average of 87%.
Information on the Taught Masters Scholarship Scheme is available at www.nuigalway.ie/postgraduate/scholarships. For more information on postgraduate opportunities at NUI Galway visit www.nuigalway.ie/whynuigalwaypostgrad/ , or contact the Postgraduate Recruitment Office at 091 495184 or postgrad@nuigalway.ie.
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NUI Galway graduates Dr Shane Browne and Dr Michael Monaghan have both been awarded the European Society for Biomaterials-European Doctoral Award for their research in biomaterials. The award is given annually by the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB) and confers added value to the doctoral degrees of the recipients.
The award serves to recognise a European or international dimension of the researchers’ work. Both Dr Browne and Dr Monaghan qualified for the award by fulfilling a number of requirements, including studying abroad during their doctoral research, publishing in high-impact scientific journals and presenting at international conferences.
The awards also acknowledge Professor Abhay Pandit, supervisor to both researchers during their PhDs and Director of CÚRAM, the Centre for Research in Medical Devices, proving the integration of this group’s research at an international level.
“I would like to congratulate Shane and Michael on their success and achievements”, said NUI Galway’s Professor Pandit. “They are the third and fourth researchers from the team to receive this award, which speaks to the high calibre of professionals we have developed in the biomaterials sector.”
CÚRAM’s core research competencies include cell manufacture, drug delivery and biomaterials. Dr Browne’s research involved the tempering of inflammation and the formation of new blood vessels using a collagen-based biomaterial system. Dr Monaghan’s research focused on the development of microRNA-mediated gene silencing delivery methods, for application in modulating extracellular matrix remodeling, which can help protect and repair internal organs after injury. Both research projects were funded through Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland.
Dr Browne is now working as an Irish Research Council postdoctoral researcher in Professor Kevin Healy’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, on the development of strategies to deliver pro-angiogenic progenitor cells to ischemic tissue using hyaluronic acid-based hydrogels.
Dr Monaghan is currently a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in Professor Katja Schenke-Layland’s laboratory at the Department of Cell and Tissue Engineering, in the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB. His current research involves studying the formation of cardiomyocytes from fibroblasts using small molecules and exogenous microRNAs.
CÚRAM is a national research centre advancing R&D in the medical device sector. Supported by Science Foundation Ireland and industry partners, CÚRAM enhances Ireland’s standing as a major hub for the global medical devices industry.
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